Adutude's comments

In the real world, in quite a few companies, in order to accomplish X, you must sit through many meetings with others that have nothing to do with accomplishing X.

There are also many other logistical hurdles that you must overcome to accomplish X. The problem is that often, I do not need to attend the meetings, nor do I need to overcome the logistical/political) hurdles to accomplish X, and more often than not these are impediments to accomplishing X.

It really varies from company to company, my point is, I want to get paid for the time, because I can never be certain how much I will have to waste in meetings and other un-related tasks before I can complete a given accomplishment, due to dependencies on others.

Add to all of that the litmus test of a completed "accomplishment" can be very subjective, e.g. something one person thinks is done, is not seen that way by someone else, and you don't get paid until everyone agrees it is done?

There's also the old scope creep monster, that rears it's ugly head. What you had to accomplish at the beginning of the project changed half way through and now you have do twice the work to complete the "accomplishment".

My time is the most valuable thing I have and the older I get the move valuable it becomes. I'm not going to roll the dice that whoever is writing the checks will have the same perception that something was accomplished as I do. I don't want to have to spend more time to "accomplish" something, just because someone "moved the goal-post".

On the other hand if you are a consultant and it's a vendor/customer relationship, then it's up to you as the vendor to define the "accomplishment" and build in a way that both vendor and customer can agree on when an "accomplishment" is finished. Scope creep is handled by additional statements of work, etc.

When there are contracts and potentially lawyers involved, paying for accomplishments is a little more tenable, in an employer employee relationship, where as the employee if you don't like it you can find another job, not so much.

Imagine if every time you got paid you had to have a meeting with your manager to determine exactly what you had accomplished, with the manager making the final decision on whether it was done or not? Suppose they decide that program you wrote needs more testing to be "accomplished", or an extra feature that was not originally scoped needs to be added and until such time, they aren't going to pay you? That sounds like the stuff of nightmares to me.

I've used what I learned in this course more than any learning I've done. IMHO This should be a required course before a student graduates high school (or sooner).

Are we really having this discussion on Hacker News? As Hackers we should all be MATHing and SCIENCEing

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02801-8

This article has some good links to studies and articles, some math and science.

It also points out you don't even have to science very much, there is lots of anecdotal evidence that shows that in gatherings where masks are worn, transmission is slowed.

Lot's of other factors play into that, but you only have to math a wee tiny bit to realize that properly worn masks can help fewer people be infected, and therefore fewer people will die.

MATH.

This has some nice visualizations based on anecdotal evidence and statistical analysis and compares transmission rates in different settings given the variables of masks wearing vs. no masks and ventilation vs no ventilation, while also taking into account surface based transmission.

https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-10-28/a-room-a-bar-a...

We should all just be on GMT. In software development on Pacific time, I always feel bad for the guys offshore that have to stay up late at night to make our morning meetings. It sure would make things a lot more easy from a coding perspective.

But to the point DST only adds complexity to the already complex task of converting time to GMT and back so that you can synchronize events in different time-zones, I fully support this effort.

One of my favorite dialogs of his was from an old Bond movie.

Girl: Hi I'm Plenty

Bond: But of course you are

Girl: Plenty O'Toole

Bond: Named after your father perhaps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CElBVpRFk4Q

And nobody will every make a Mankini as manly as you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVakHZp5ZBE

Thank you for all the good times.

So this appears to be, the very old, software that was pushed to production before it was ready story. I have to wonder if there wasn't some Marketing/PR/Mgmt person(s) that pushed the engineers to release the software before it was ready or was it the result of lack of due diligence on the part of the engineers, who couldn't wait to get their code running in the real world.

>We did implement checks for what seemed to us as more common failure scenarios, but the devil here was that this one first appeared during the run and we did not cover it at the analytical analysis stage.

I little more time in testing for the edge cases could have helped avoid this expensive fail.

You have to test for much more than just the "common failure scenarios", when you engineer solutions where failure could be very expensive in terms of money and lives.

Someone just needs to create a swiss army knife headless browser streaming file saver/converter and leave out any text about how to download youtube videos with it.

Then the community can be like Popcorn time and say, ahem, no copyright infringing code here.

Or a version could even be released w/out the test cases and or README files that make any reference to any type of "illegal" activities.

From my perspective it kind of seems like YouTube-dl is like a knife, it can cut your food, but it can also be used to kill someone. In the case of YouTube-dl the knife was included with instructions on how to kill someone, so it was deemed a potential "murder weapon".

  What if someone sold a car and included instructions on how to run over pedestrians?  Should the car no longer be sold, or should the instructions be removed?

My point here is that banning all of something based on the fact that the something could be used to commit illegal acts, when that same something also has legitimate legal uses, is a slippery slope. These days the RIAA pretty much lives on that slippery slope.

I agree completely. Steve Ballmer put all of Microsoft eggs in the Office Basket that let mobile die on the vine. He pushed licensing and marketing and left developers and new tech to languish. It's why to this day, Microsoft doesn't have a place in the mobile space, it's iOS or Android. I also aggree that pushing MS in a more Open source direction has helped make them more palatable to developers.

From a business standpoint, I would have to agree he did turn them around from a business standpoint.

As a user of Windows since 3.1 (w/out networking). I do the same as MekaiGS "I honestly have no idea where all the Windows settings are anymore so I just search instead."

It was like multiple teams designed different parts of the settings but they never had any meetings or talked with each other.

There are days when I would rather use Microsoft Bob than Windows 10

Or better yet, Microsoft Joe Bob http://www.bytebrothers.org/joebob.htm "Go Microsoft -- Go Intel -- Go America," and "QuickTime is for Pinko Hippie Wimps."

In the article it references a Gallup poll and says, "Nearly two-thirds of employees who have been working remotely would like to continue to do so"

So the Majority of people want to continue to work remote, I would put out there that the only people that want to go back into the office are are busy bodies and control freaks. (Lookin' at you Satya)

IMHO Working from home solves the problem of, "Stop the chitty chatty and get back to work", and it partially solves the problem of "Hey man, stop riding me like a rented mule".

So spending less time polluting the planet travelling in shiny metal boxes to go to giant concrete boxes to sit in tiny metal and fabric cubes is a bad thing?

I'm going next level on remote. Got a sail boat and I'm going full water world. I'll say hi to Kevin Costner for ya.

Here we are again, discussing politics in our tech forum. Why? Because we invented brain washing machines. Social media married w/ Algorithms and AI.

The bigger story here is that these brainwashing machines are susceptible to being manipulated by their owners to meet their own subjective needs.

It gets even worse, because these are for-profit companies, the brain washing machines are being rented out to the highest bidder.

Even worse than that the owners of these machines are being pressured and manipulated by others, in power, to affect outcomes that, as it turns out, are probably not in the best interest of the public at large.

I think that title is more fitting.

I am so tired of hearing what CEO's want. As a worker bee, I want to work from home. I want human contact with my family and friends. Co-workers, not so important.

Not to mention, I don't have to spend hours every day in traffic driving too and from work, I don't have to pay for the gas, it doesn't pollute the environment and not to mention, I don't have to sit in a cubicle that recirculates air to the point that when one person gets sick, the whole floor falls like dominoes.

So instead of whining like a bunch of petulant children about how there's no "creative combustion", these overpaid complainers need to suck it up and do what's best for the mental and physical health of the people that work for them, and do what's best for the communities who's resources they consume to generate a profit. Just sayin..

I was just talking w/ someone about the good old days (and farting some dust) and back in the day, if someone was trolling hard, or spamming or running bots that should not be run, they got hacked, and hard. Your servers would be a smoldering ruins.

Then there was that case of the spammer who got hacked for being an ahat and he sued and got the hackers sent to big boy prison. That was back in the mid to late 80's (I think... it was so long ago.

Back then we were setting up uucp, and uudecoding alt and we were all alt.binaries.gifs.sex.freaky.youdontwanttoknow

Aol wasn't even a thing yet, but after Gen Pop got let in to the Intenet and that spam guy got someone put in jail, it was all downhill IMHO..

Oh noes, my beloved hacker news has sunk down into the political morass.

I think the bigger picture, and meta topic here is that private companies have become the arbiters of what is and what is not appropriate social discourse.

We as a society have chosen to let the Marks and Jacks of the world decide what is appropriate to publish.

I think the bigger part of the problem is that while we sit and argue about whether the policy was fair or not or was biased or not, we are not asking the question of are the right people setting those policies?

Should private companies with no accountability to the public they serve/sell to the highest bidder, be the ones to decide what constitutes valid social discourse?

We all thought social media was a good idea, when we were young up and coming geeks. We thought it would be a force for good and allow people to connect and talk.

What we as geeks actually invented were a bunch of brain washing machines that profit by selling the minds of their "users".

I have an opinion about whether or not there was bias, but I don't think it's as important as the bigger question this story brings up.

We now, in this thread are fighting about how the brain washing machines are being used, instead of the IMHO, the more important topic of, how can we turn off the brain washing machines and put the genie back in the bottle?

Also the "right" way often changes, in technology, and if you only learned the "right" way, when a better way comes out, you'll miss it because you only ever learned the "right" way and it's all you know.

I bought one of their laptops a few year ago. I needed a new power supply as the cable had frayed that came w/ the unit. I wanted to get the original cable, so I called and asked "what was the original manufacturer" so I could purchase a new power supply. They would not tell me and they wanted approx. $75 for a replacement from System 76. I peeled the sticker System 76 put on the bottom and found out it was a Clevo. Once I had the original Clevo model number I was able to purchase a new power supply, that worked, for $29 plus shipping. In short, hardware was good and performed well, their Linux integration was awesome (camera, wireless and all the other do-dads worked flawlessly), but IMO they are overpriced and their lack of candor about their re-branding put me off quite a bit. If having your Linux run w/out issues on your hardware purchase is important it might be worth it to you spend the extra $$.

The name.... reminds me of <blink>Annoying Text</blink>

In the US, there are a number of us that wake up every day and feel like our hair is on fire. We read the news, hoping that at some point our elected leaders will do their job and rein in the madness, so we can, for a change, sleep well at night. Anything not related to the circus that is currently running our country is pretty much back-page.